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In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Siddhartha Mukherjee about his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital. A former Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford (where he received a PhD studying cancer-causing viruses) and from Harvard Medical School. His laboratory focuses on discovering new cancer drugs using innovative biological methods. He has published articles and commentary in such journals as Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron and the Journal of Clinical Investigation and in publications such as the New York Times,The New Yorker, and the New Republic. His work was nominated for Best American Science Writing, 2000. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. His most recent book is The Gene: An Intimate History.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick about their latest film, The Vietnam War.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are two of the most accomplished documentary filmmakers of our time. Their work includes The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, The War, along with many other acclaimed films. Their most recent project is the ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, The Vietnam War, which tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. The Vietnam War also features more than 100 iconic musical recordings from greatest artists of the era.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Thomas Metzinger about the scientific and experiential understanding of consciousness. They also talk about the significance of WWII for the history of ideas, the role of intuition in science, the ethics of building conscious AI, the self as an hallucination, how we identify with our thoughts, attention as the root of the feeling of self, the place of Eastern philosophy in Western science, and the limitations of secular humanism.

Thomas K. Metzinger is full professor and director of the theoretical philosophy group and the research group on neuroethics/neurophilosophy at the department of philosophy, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. He is the founder and director of the MIND group and Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, Germany. His research centers on analytic philosophy of mind, applied ethics, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. He is the editor of Neural Correlates of Consciousness and the author of Being No One and The Ego Tunnel.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Joseph Romm about how the climate is changing and how we know that human behavior is the primary cause. They discuss why small changes in temperature matter so much, the threats of sea-level rise and desertification, the best and worst case scenarios, the Paris Climate Agreement, the politics surrounding climate science, and many other topics.

Joseph Romm is one of the country’s leading communicators on climate science and solutions. He was Chief Science Advisor for “Years of Living Dangerously,” which won the 2014 Emmy Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Series. He is the founding editor of Climate Progress, which Tom Friedman of the New York Times called “the indispensable blog.” In 2009, Time named him one of its “Heroes of the Environment,” and Rolling Stone put him on its list of 100 “people who are reinventing America.” Romm was acting assistant secretary of energy in 1997, where he oversaw $1 billion in low-carbon technology development and deployment. He is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. He is the author of Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Max Tegmark about his new book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. They talk about the nature of intelligence, the risks of superhuman AI, a nonbiological definition of life, the substrate independence of minds, the relevance and irrelevance of consciousness for the future of AI, near-term breakthroughs in AI, and other topics.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Douglas Murray about identity politics, the rise of white nationalism, the events in Charlottesville, guilt by association, the sources of western values, the problem of finding meaning in a secular world, and other topics.

Douglas Murray is Associate Editor of the Spectator and writes frequently for a variety of other publications, including the Sunday Times, Standpoint and the Wall Street Journal. He has also given talks at both the British and European Parliaments and at the White House. He is the author of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with David Pizarro and Tamler Sommers about free speech on campus, the Scott Adams podcast, the failings of the mainstream media, persuasion, moral certainty, the ethics of abortion, Buddhism, the illusion of the self, and other topics.

David Pizarro is an associate professor in the department of psychology at Cornell University. His research focuses on how and why humans make moral judgments (such as what makes us think certain actions are wrong, or that some people deserve blame or praise for their actions). He’s also interested in how emotions—especially disgust—influence a wide variety of social, political, and moral judgments.

Tamler Sommers is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston. He teaches primarily in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law, specializing in issues relating to free will, moral responsibility, punishment, and revenge.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Robert Sapolsky about his work with baboons, the opposition between reason and emotion, doubt, the evolution of the brain, the civilizing role of the frontal cortex, the illusion of free will, justice and vengeance, brain-machine interface, religion, drugs, and other topics.

Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. He is the author of A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Gavin de Becker about the primacy of human intuition in the prediction and prevention of violence.

Gavin de Becker is a three-time presidential appointee whose pioneering work has changed the way the U.S. government evaluates threats to its highest officials. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on the prediction and management of violence. His firm, Gavin de Becker and Associates, advises many of the world’s most prominent media figures, corporations, and law enforcement agencies on predicting violence, and it also serves regular citizens who are victims of domestic abuse and stalking. Gavin is the author of #1 New York Times bestseller The Gift of Fear.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with David Brooks about his book The Road to Character, the importance of words like “sin” and “virtue,” self-esteem vs. self-overcoming, the significance of keeping promises, honesty, President Trump, and other topics.

David Brooks is one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators. He is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and appears regularly on the PBS NewsHour and Meet the Press. He is the bestselling author of The Social Animal, Bobos in Paradise, and The Road to Character.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Mark Bowden about the problem of a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Mark Bowden is the author of thirteen books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down. He reported at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and now writes for the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and other magazines. He is also the writer in residence at the University of Delaware. His most recent book is Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Geoffrey West about how biological and social systems scale, the significance of fractals, the prospects of radically extending human life, the concept of “emergence” in complex systems, the importance of cities, the necessity for continuous innovation, and other topics.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Douglas Murray about his book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.

Douglas Murray is Associate Editor of the Spectator and writes frequently for a variety of other publications, including the Sunday Times, Standpoint and the Wall Street Journal. He has also given talks at both the British and European Parliaments and at the White House. He is the author of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Kevin Kelly about why it’s so hard to predict future technology, the nature of intelligence, the “singularity,” artificial consciousness, and other topics.

Kevin Kelly helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor for its first seven years. He has written for The New York Times, The Economist, Science, Time, and The Wall Street Journal among many other publications. His previous books include Out of Control, New Rules for the New Economy, Cool Tools, and What Technology Wants. His most recent book isThe Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Fareed Zakaria about his career as a journalist, Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” political partisanship, Trump, the health of the news media, the connection between Islam and intolerance, and other topics.

Fareed Zakaria is host of CNN’s flagship international affairs program — Fareed Zakaria GPS — a Washington Post columnist, a contributing editor at The Atlantic and a New York Times bestselling author. He was described in 1999 by Esquire Magazine as “the most influential foreign policy adviser of his generation.” In 2010, Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 global thinkers. He is the author of The Future of Freedom,The Post-American World, and In Defense of a Liberal Education.